Can’t Get No Worse

I have bought zero (0) DC comics in the last…um…well I’m not sure how long. (Unless you count Tiny Titans. Does that count?)

Anyway, the point is, I haven’t read any of the new reboot titles. Nonetheless, I surf the internets, and the new (new!) issue of Red Hood and the Outlaws appears to have really gone above and beyond and then through the basement and into the pig trough in its pursuit of the absolute, uncontested, nadir of idiotic giggling fanboy “I have never seen a woman but occasionally I wipe my dick with my four-colored friends” sexism.

But the one glimmer of goodness here is that DC’s idiocy has prompted a good bit of entertaining blogosphere commentary. For example, this from Graeme McMillan at Newsarama.

That’s right, fanboys! You liked it when Starfire wanted to jump into bed with Robin way back when they were in the New Teen Titans together? Well now she’s a sex-hungry warrior bimbo who not only can’t remember her ex-boyfriend, but can’t tell men apart so she’ll sleep with them all! That’s, uh, definitely the reboot that some people were potentially wanting to see! Maybe! Possibly.

Scott Lobdell gives his audience, his industry, possibly his entire gender the finger and says “Oh no, you motherfuckers. That’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is a woman that will literally have sex with you just for existing. No woman with any standards, no matter how low, no matter how forgiving, could possibly be attracted to you, so here’s your new sex object—a brain-damaged goldfish with a rack. And you’re such a scared little boy, so afraid of commitment in even your own pathetic fantasies, that you’ll run away from a ‘clinger’ even if she’s as gorgeous, charming, and supportive as the woman Starfire used to be. You can’t bear even that slight chance that she’ll make you move out of your parents’ basement, get a real job, and make something of yourself. So I’ll cater to that too! Not only doesn’t she want a relationship, she won’t even remember you! That’s what you want in the end, isn’t it? A vagina-shaped goldfish! Look upon your lust, ye nerdy, and despair.”

Most of all, what I keep coming back to is that superhero comics are nothing if not aspirational. They are full of heroes that inspire us to be better, to think more things are possible, to imagine a world where we can become something amazing. But this is what comics like this tell me about myself, as a lady: They tell me that I can be beautiful and powerful, but only if I wear as few clothes as possible. They tell me that I can have exciting adventures, as long as I have enormous breasts that I constantly contort to display to the people around me. They tell me I can be sexually adventurous and pursue my physical desires, as long as I do it in ways that feel inauthentic and contrived to appeal to men and kind of creep me out. When I look at these images, that is what I hear, and I don’t think I even realized how much until this week.

And I’m tired. I’m so, so tired of hearing those messages from comics because they aren’t the dreams or the escapist fantasies or the aspirations that I want to have. They don’t make me feel joyful or powerful or excited. They make me feel so goddamn sad that I want to cry, because I have devoted my entire life to comics, and when I read superhero books like these I realize that most of the time, they don’t give a sh*t about me.

I have been doing this for a long time, now. I have lived in the neighborhood of superhero comics for a long time. And frankly, if this is how they think it’s ok to treat me when I walk down the street in a place that I thought belonged to me just as much as anyone else who lives here, then I’m not sure I want to live here anymore.

I think Laura’s got the right idea…but I hope she moves quickly through grief and on into indifference. Because nobody should be crying over contemporary mainstream superhero comics.

And the reason nobody should cry is because Laura’s absolutely right. Mainstream comics don’t give a shit about her. Criticizing DC is worthwhile because pointing out sexism is worthwhile and good writing is worthwhile and most of all because these morons deserve to be insulted. But hoping that Dan Didio is going to give a fuck about feminist complaints is like hoping that the coal industry will, after serious discussion, suddenly decide that solar energy is the future. You can teach an old dog new tricks, maybe, but you can’t turn an old dog into a penguin.

I’ve said this before more or less (most recently here) but maybe it bears repeating. Superhero comics are a tiny, niche market. Within that market, women are a tiny minority (10% at best, from the figures I’ve been able to find.) The audience for superhero comics is the small rump of 30-year-old plus men who have been reading superhero comics for 20-plus years and still want to read about the child-oriented characters of their youth — only, you know, in a kind of skeevy, adult way.

Now, maybe you read superhero comics, and that doesn’t describe what you want from them. Which is cool — but it’s worth realizing that you are in the minority (among superhero comics readers. You’re among the vast, vast majority in terms of the rest of the world, obviously.)

If the reboot makes anything clear, it’s that the core audience remains the core audience. It’s not going anywhere. This is what mainstream superhero comics are.

The point being, the best possible outcome here is not that DC starts writing better stories. It isn’t that they become more diverse. It isn’t that they hire more female creators. The best possible (note I said “possible”) outcome is that these shitheads finally, finally go out of business.

And if they do, you know what? It won’t be the end of comics, because there are lots and lots of comics. It won’t be the end of superheroes, because they’ll go on in other mediums…and, for that matter, there are lots of superhero comics not by the big two (many of them made in Japan). It won’t even be the end of your favorite characters, I wouldn’t think — there’ll still be back issues. If you love Starfire you can reread those old Teen Titans comics, which certainly had their problems…but at least Marv Wolfman seemed to care about Starfire the way creators care about their characters, rather than the way fanboys care about the fetish object they’ve been wanking to for decades.

And if you must, must, must have new Starfire content…well, write it yourself. Your fan fiction isn’t going to be any worse, and certainly won’t be any less “valid”, than the crappy corporate fan fiction DC is churning out. DC doesn’t own your characters, they don’t own your dreams, and they don’t own your aspirations. What they do own is some copyrights, and no doubt those will only be removed with force from their cold, dead corporate hands. Which is all the more reason to wish those cold corporate hands extinct. Maybe, if we’re very lucky, this reboot will be looked back upon not as another failed, stupid, embarrassing detour, but as the beginning of the end.

32 Comments

The term “Reboot” is derived, I suppose from its usage in reference to computers, that seems to be in turn appropriated from the language of junkies, as in “booting up” or injecting heroin. It is appropriate for its current incarnation to describe product sold to customers who are presumed to be desperate for more of the same stuff.

This stuff is really, really putrid. You don’t need a PhD in Women’s Studies to give a basic shit about how women are treated in our artform.

I think it’s astute that you’ve pointed out that all superhero comics are fanfiction, considering the arbitrary way that multiple labyrinthine continuities sometimes collide and overlap. One writer’s vision of Bob Kane’s creature has little to do with the dozen or so other writers who’ll be helming the title in six months.

There are people around acting as if this kind of thing is in fact something new which will bring in new fans.
What it proves is the same act can be rolled out over and over again for an ever shrinking number of hold outs. New universe with a bunch of #1 issues. The same content, and the same marketing ideas.

Holly, I guess the people in charge are pretending that…is anybody else fooled?

Michael, the only problem with calling it fan fiction is that it’s kind of an insult to people who do fan fiction. That’s what I’m trying to say at the end; fan fiction is infinitely better than this crap.

Though I did pick up Batwoman #1. Relies on old continuity with which I am not familiar, so “hi, new readers!” She does fight a gang of pool-ball themed varmints, which was delightful.

She and her sidekick do get casually naked changing costumes. Maybe exploitative? Hard to say. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be titillating. It’s charged even if it’s not, since we’re not going to see Batman strip down to his skivvies.

Your comparison to the energy industry is awfully flattering. There are legitimate technological barrier to an en masse switch from burning carbon to solar and wind energy. There are absolutely zero real barriers to writing comics that treat female characters, female readers, and male readers who give half a shit about women (which, again, is not the “class of male feminist activists,” but, rather, “class of moderately decent human beings”) with a modicum of respect.

The barrier is demographic, though…and I think it’s real, albeit self-inflicted in some sense. The number of people who want to see superheroes-orignally-designed-for-fourteen-year-olds-in-stories-that-target-thirty-plus-year-olds just isn’t that big. You kind of aren’t going to entertain that demographic and simultaneously entertain very many other people. And when you stop worrying about entertaining anyone other than people who are exactly like you…well, you get something like this comic.

Thank you for brightening my evening after a long rainy day.
Your collective spleen is heartwarming, especially you Noah. The air brushed breast is clearly the apex of digital color and is particularly apropriate for coloring plastic breasts. Come on those aren’t real, which is doubly tragic because this is a comic book and we could at least look at breasts that have some relation to reality. Yes on top of everything else, I depise the coloring.(Those breasts are nearly as creepy as Richard Corbin’s girls” breasts.)

I don’t understand why, with DC pretending its 52 thing is so innovative, that no one stopped and realized that this was actually the same old shit, that they were just competing with Marvel over a small and diminishing demographic, as Noah points out. Doesn’t it seem kind of obvious you need new kinds of stories, new kinds of genres, new kinds of characters, to draw in new readers? To eliminate the stigma of comics as male adolescent wish fulfillment?

Maybe WB doesn’t really care what Didio does with DC, so long as it makes some kind of profit and/or produces movie franchises.

There are a lot of fanboys who actually believe this book is “feminist” because it show a “sexually liberated woman” having sex just for fun, also Jason and Roy are the real “sex objects”, basically walking dildos. Really, there are people who believe that.

The remaining small group of super hero comic book fans have behaved just as expected right down to buying multiple copies as a financial investment.
The next logical step is super-porno. That’s clearly the direction.

When I said “modicum of respect” that’s really all I meant. Claremont’s X-Men, Wolfman’s Teen Titans, heck, even Archie comics, consistently, for decades, have managed to tell stories with appealing, developed female characters who also have a definite fanboy appeal.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not even asking for a lot. There’sa certain amount of cheesecake that, sure, is fueled by an underlying sexism but doesn’t bug me — I am willing to write it off as all in good fun.

Then there’s creepy exploitation. At some point a female character isn’t a character — she’s first and foremost a sex object for the reader. I’m not sure where to draw the line, and I’m sure that there are hundreds of really good, worthwhile even, sub-debates about where particular things fall on that line (“Is it offensive that She-Hulk tears out of more clothing than Hulk does, or is that just good clean fun?” “Are Zatanna’s fishnets offensive? Okay, what about Black Canary’s?”).

I am sure that a lot of what I’m seeing from the new 52 falls on the wrong side of my personal, gut-based line. And I don’t see any reason for it. The demographic line doesn’t fly, because you could avoid THIS level of nonsense and still sell a lot of comics to fanboys. (Or kind of a lot. It’s DC).

I’m not saying that the problem is that they have to do it this way in order to sell comics to their demographic. I’m saying that the demographic has turned in on itself to such an extent that they can’t help themselves. This is who they are; this is who they’re selling to. They can’t see anything else; they’re incapable of doing anything else, or appealing to anyone else. They’ve been alienating other audiences for decades now, to such an extent that there’s no realistic chance of them appealing to new readers, so there’s little incentive for them to pretend they care about new readers any more.

Based on the popularity of super hero movies, and porn the demographic for type of content being published by DC and Marvel
is much larger than the current readership. The problem for DC and Marvel is that large group who like supers and porn, and might possibly like DC and Marvel comic books, aren’t comic book readers.
The comic books are very expensive in ratio to the entertainment return. I would think people who are not currently readers of mainstream super hero comics would see Netflix as a better value. And the larger group is invested in action-adventure-sex-fx, not a long time personal “relationship” with comics shop culture, super heroes, and “Iconic” comic book publishers.

———————
I believe I have a new motto…”However bad you think things are, they’re probably much worse.”
———————

———————
Oscar says:

There are a lot of fanboys who actually believe this book is “feminist” because it show a “sexually liberated woman” having sex just for fun…Really, there are people who believe that.
———————–

An unfortunate side-effect of all those feminists who argued that “women should be able to have sex just for fun, without commitments, the way men do” (not to mention how it’s “empowering” when a woman chooses to display herself as a sex object, as was said in defense of Madonna’s doing so, back in the day)…

…is that guys* end up being given exactly what they want.

About the prostitution-glamorizing Brit TV series “The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl”:

————————-
…It turns out that, by coincidence, the TV Belle lives right round the corner from where my daughter and I watched that sad prostitute, so desperate to earn her living that she had to clamber down broken steps into a rubble-filled basement to cater to the sexual urges of a stranger in return for a handful of notes.

But in Belle’s world, all is beautiful, the men wouldn’t lay a finger on her and it’s champagne, fast cars and flash restaurants all the way.

Extraordinarily, the series has been written and produced by a team of women. Producer Chrissy Skinns says that it is important that “the writers of the show are all women, talking about prostitution from the female point of view…”

…Their research, she assures us, was extensive: “Yann, the director, and Greg, the designer, visited a fetish festival looking for interesting props. When we came to shoot an episode about S&M, a dominatrix came on set and explained the safety elements, where not to hit a client and how to walk on a man wearing stilettos.” How reassuring to know.

Skinns concludes that The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl reveals a fascinating world which you never see on TV in quite this way – “it’s a long way from murdered hookers in detective shows”.

————————–
…A few months ago, a woman…told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the reason thousands of young women chose to upload pictures of their breasts for free so that men could rate them on the Nuts website was because it was “empowering” to do so.
—————————http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7150200.stm

* At least the loutish, shallow kind; which is what, 90% of them? At least?

It seems like a bit of a stretch to blame this page on feminists en masse. Lots of feminists have been skeptical of the empowering effects of no-strings-attached sex. Andrea Dworkin argued that hippie sexual liberation was about controlling women, not empowering them, for example.

And as Dworkin notes, men have long been eager to promote sleeping around as liberation to women. They never really needed to have feminists sell them on it — and as Laura Hudston’s piece says, there are plenty of reasons for sex-positive feminists to loathe this incarnation of Starfire as well.

Stop hating on my mainstream comics! Stop being mean to my DC, they never did anything wrong! It’s not like they have a Catwoman comic where you essentially see Batman and her having sex and its implied he is “inside her” right on the page and….oh.

Hey, I’m not going to defend the company, but I will say I’m reading some of the DC books. Animal Man is pretty good. I’m just not reading the shit like what we’re talking about here.

It seems like a bit of a stretch to blame this page on feminists en masse. Lots of feminists have been skeptical of the empowering effects of no-strings-attached sex…
———————

Being perfectly aware that it was far from a universal view among feminists, that’s why I said, “those feminists who argued that ‘women should be able to have sex just for fun, without commitments, the way men do’…” (Emphasis added.)

Noah, I think I get your point now…you’re saying that DC editorial and creators have now disappeared so far up their own asses that they’re not even aware of how offensive their product is — because they themselves are part of the highly insular subculture of people who are not only not offended, but actively turned on by this stuff.

I think that is most certainly the best explanation for what we’re seeing.

As far as the noxious sequence above, it’s just a superhero spin on the crass sexism and infantile wish-fulfillment (really hawt babe wants to do it, no strings attached, with an utterly ordinary slacker* schlump, who’s done nothing whatsoever to merit her attentions) of the larger overall “culture.”

“DC editorial and creators have now disappeared so far up their own asses that they’re not even aware of how [insularly idiotic] their product is — because they themselves are part of the highly insular subculture of people who are not only not offended, but actively turned on by this stuff.”

…And this reboot was supposedly done trying to seek a larger audience? All they’re doing is giving their ever-shrinking fanbase more of what they go for, on steroids.

*In the classic slacker pose; he may as well be sprawled on an armchair in front of the idiot box with a bag of Cheetos.